Reports from Libya earlier this year confirmed that hundreds of Libyan fighters as well as NATO-supplied weapons and cash were pledged to the FSA by Al Qaeda’s Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) commander, Abdul Hakim Belhaj.

These accounts of sectarian violence are by no means the first. Bloomberg conceded recently that “the sectarian civil war between Syria’s Sunnis and Alawites that the world had long feared has begun,” the manifestation of warnings by international geopolitical analysts signaled as early as 2007.

Image: Christians in Syria have been particularly hit hard by what is being described as “ethnic cleansing,” not by Syrian security forces, but by NATO-backed death squads under the banner of the “Free Syrian Army.” The LA Times has been quietly reporting on the tragedy of Syria’s minorities at the hands of the Syrian rebels for months – and indicates that wider genocide will take place, just as it is now in Libya, should Syria’s government collapse under foreign pressure.

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It is admittedly under the current Syrian government that Syria’s large populations of ethnic and religious minorities, particularly Shi’ia Muslims, moderate Sunnis, Christians, and Druze have been protected from the inevitable sectarian onslaught by extremists cultivated by the West. In 2007, in Hersh’s “The Redirection,” the following foreshadowing to Bloomberg’s “sectarian civil war” was given:

“Robert Baer, a former longtime C.I.A. agent in Lebanon, has been a severe critic of Hezbollah and has warned of its links to Iranian-sponsored terrorism. But now, he told me, “we’ve got Sunni Arabs preparing for cataclysmic conflict, and we will need somebody to protect the Christians in Lebanon. It used to be the French and the United States who would do it, and now it’s going to be Nasrallah and the Shiites” -The Redirection, Seymour Hersh (2007)